Edward Gibbon is best known for The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire published in six volumes by 1788, but he also served in the military and in Parliament, predominantly with Hampshire connections.  By the end of his life, he was considered ‘a giant of the Enlightenment’, his work praised for…

Born at the family mansion Englefield House, situated near Reading, Sir Henry was the eldest son of the Sixth Baronet, Sir Henry Englefield and his second wife Catherine (nee Buck). In 1778, aged 26, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in the following year a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.

Her father, William Escombe, was a shipping and insurance agent with the family firm Escombe, McGrath & Company Ltd in Manchester, which provided the family with a comfortable living. They moved to Bishopstoke in 1874, where Dorothy was born two years later.

Florence was born in Sandhurst, Berkshire, to Rev. John Hepburne Merriott, an Oxford graduate and Assistant Master at Eton College, and his wife Caroline. He died in Winchester in 1919, living at Dormy Cottage, 49 St Cross Road, where Florence and her husband later came to live (father’s will: 5M64/40. Microfilm).

Leslie Grinsell was born in Hornsey, London and raised largely in Brighton, developing an early interest in archaeology through visits to Brighton Museum.  Although he was initially attracted by stone tools, he came to focus his attention on barrows, realising that these were among the least well understood prehistoric monuments in the British landscape and one of the few categories…

Born in Echunga, in the Adelaide Hills, South Australia, in 1852 – only three years after the town had been founded – by 1861 she was living as a young girl in Alresford with her parents, Jacob and Mary. Jacob was a wealthy businessman who had come to England in 1853 after 14 years in…

See also: Piggott, Stuart Ernest

Arthur Green was born in in 1866 in Bromsgrove, the eldest of three children of a prosperous grocer. He was a medical student in Edgbaston, Warwickshire in the 1890s. He qualified as a surgeon and set up in practice in Ledbury. He kept a large household in New Street, Ledbury. During the First World War…

Félicité Hardcastle was born in Oxford. Her great grandfather was Sir William Herschel and her father, Joseph Alfred Hardcastle, was also a noted astronomer.  When he died, in 1916, she and her mother moved to the New Forest village of Burley.

John Hooper Harvey trained as an architect under his father and under Sir Herbert Baker. He worked before WW2 for the Ministry of Public Works, then as a lecturer in the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College, London from 1950-1959. He was Consultant Architect to Winchester College from 1947 to 1986, and Keeper of…